


and she will be wise

by fardareismai



Series: Imagine Claire and Jamie (Prompts from the blog that I have fulfilled) [2]
Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Family Conflict, Gen, post-second-book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 08:35:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5085616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fardareismai/pseuds/fardareismai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imagine Jamie and Claire raising Brianna and the time comes to discipline her for the first time. Clash of two cultures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and she will be wise

Her father taught her compassion, and her mother taught her courage.

Her mother taught her ruthlessness, and her father taught her mercy.

Her father taught her to mend, and her mother taught her to cut.

She looked like her father with her height and her red hair.  She sounded like him, his Scottish burr rather than her mother’s clipped vowels.  She looked at the world through clear blue eyes, rather than crystalline gold, and perhaps that was why she said it.

“ **Claire** ,” her father said in the next room, his voice low, but still carrying through to where Brianna sat awaiting their decision.  She so rarely heard her father use her mother’s first name that it startled her, and she knew that he was very serious.  “ **She has done wrong and she must pay the consequence.** ”  


“ **You’ll not raise a hand to your daughter, James Fraser,** ” her mother hissed.  “ **You swore to me-** ”  


“ **I swore that I’d never raise a hand to _you_ , Claire,**” he said, warningly.  “ **And dinna think I’ve never regretted it in all these years.** ”  


“ **She is my flesh, and what you do to her you do to me,** ” Claire said, and Briana could hear the choked pain in her mother’s voice.  


“ **Sassenach** ,” Jamie said, his voice changing from warning to soothing in a moment, “ **it’s the way things are done, a nighean donn.  Shall we keep her from going to school lest the schoolmaster tawse her palm?** ”  


“ **The schoolmaster is not _you_ , Jamie.  There’s a difference.**”  


“ **Aye, there is, for when discipline comes from me she knows that it is not because I dislike her, nor because it gives me any pleasure, which it might for a schoolmaster, but because it must be done.  It’s justice, mo cridh, not malice.** ”  


**“Please don’t, Jamie.”**   


“ **Claire…** ” He was helpless against her mother’s pleading, and Brianna thought, later, that it was perhaps this that made her speak.  Her father could not hurt her mother, and her mother could not sway her father, and so it was for Brianna to say instead.  


“ **Mama, I think that Daddy should tawse me for what I’ve done,** ” she said, in a clear voice.  “ **I think it would be best to get it over with quickly.** ”  


Brianna would always believe that her father was gentler on her than her crime deserved on that day as well, because she had saved the both of them.


End file.
